Since you asked for comments, here are a few general ones.
- You use autodie, but aren't telling it to capture errors in system. The
most likely part of your program to fail is the network part (what you
currently delegate to wget), so it's probably the one you want the most
control over. Currently you'd fail silently. If you say "use autodie
qw(:all)" you'd die on the first wget failure. What would you like to do?
I'm guessing that ideally, you should retry (or have wget retry). But at
the very least, you want good error messages. To summarize this point:
don't give up contorl of error reporting in the heart of what you're trying
to accomplish.
- You're using use strict, which is very good, but notice that the way your
file handles are named, they are unchecked globals. Avoid all-uppercase,
sigilless names (FILE and so one) if you want protection; use lexicals
instead:
open my $fh, "<", "myfile" or die ...
(BTW, you have or die here and there, despite autodie. I'd recommend for
now just getting rid of autodie entirely and doing all the errors yourself.)
When you use lexical filehandles, the files are closed automatically when
the variable goes out of scoped. This is great for reads. For writes, you
should always close the file yourself to check for errors. There are fancy
ways of doing that automatically but never mind them for now.
- It's not unreasonable to use external tools in your script. Whatever gets
the job done. Of course there are tradeoffs: you comment that you don't
know if these tools are available on other platforms. Well, modules for
gzip and http may not be available on all platforms either -- take a look
at corelist if you want to make educated guesses about what to expect.
- Syntactically, this:
if (CONDITION 1) {
CODE 1
} if (CONDITION 2) {
CODE 2
} if (CONDITION 3) {
CODE 3
} ...
checks all the conditions and may run all the branches. I think you meant
"elsif" there.
- Semantically, what you're doing is extracting a bunch of values from a
hash into a number of scalars. Why? This has a few costs:
1. You have to pick names for these. If you ever scratch your head about
the name of a variable, and end up with something mundane like "first",
something's wrong. (I mean, first is perfectly all right if its scope is
very small, and within that block of code it's clear what it's intended to
refer to. But here the scope of these variables is pretty much the whole
program, and the reader is confounded with arbitrary distinctions like
"first" and "firs".
2. It's inefficient in code. You have a 20 lines of code that aren't
furthering your goal as a programmer here. Couldn't the user of this data
may as well just say $names{$some_name}?
3. It's inefficient in performance. Your for loop runs as many times as
there are elements in %names, and performs ten conditions. So you have 100
branches in your code where you didn't need any. In this case, it doesn't
matter; but you have to keep these things in mind for when you have larger
data structures.
- Again on naming, "percent" vs. "per" -- the reader can't tell what these
mangled names are for.
- I see you're using "say", which is a new language feature. If you're
doing that, you may as well know about and use given/when instead of
if/else, though like I said, it's not actually required here.
Keep having fun,
And I hope this is useful,
Gaal
On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 3:39 AM, moshe nahmias <moshegrey at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I just uploaded my first little program to github. I want your feedback on
> the script.
> the script is intended to make the statistics for mailing groups from
> their archives, for now it only works on linux (or at least if wget and
> gzip are installed).
>> So, what do you think?
> I know its not perfect so feel free to teach me, after all, that's one of
> the reasons to publish this :)
> the link: https://github.com/moshe742/mail-stats.git>> Moshe
>> _______________________________________________
> Perl mailing list
>Perl at perl.org.il>http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl>
--
Gaal Yahas <gaal at forum2.org>
http://gaal.livejournal.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/attachments/20120805/4fc5aa8c/attachment.htm